Who Are The “Late Night Work Club”?

We get a lot of studio reels submitted here, but this one really stood out. A bunch of incredible animators, including several who have been featured on Cartoon Brew over the past few years (along with a bunch of awesome up and coming people), have banded together to do a big “top-secret” independent animation project together. Here is their “hello video”:

“It’s a way to gather a bunch of people who do independent, non-commercial animation to do something cool together. A bit of a loose collective or an imprint of sorts. Kind of like the way people do indie comics or music or zines, just for the love of it. We all tend to do that independently, but a lot of us are far from any sort of central animation community and so we meet up on twitter at night when we’re up working on our individual projects. The thought occurred that we should do something with our little late night animation scene, hence the name and the concept. We’re based all over. I’m in Pittsburgh, a few people are elsewhere in the US, some are in Ireland, England, Germany and one guy is in Australia. I wrote a big long blog post about it – if for some reason you’re inclined to read it for more background info and some art from our different members.

As to the project itself, we’re keeping it top secret for now, other than it’s a group project.

So that’s about it. Just about all of us read your site regularly. We’re trying to do something cool, and maybe inspire other people out there on their own to group up and support one another. We’ll see how it works…?”

To that, all I can add is “Good Luck”! Based on the talent on display, Late Night Work Club looks to be in pretty good shape.

I think this is brilliant. I love the notion that animation is something that can be “taken back” into the underground; that artists who may have to deal with the day rigor of commercial development have the tenacity outside of that to go and breathe life into personal projects. As a person who uses that same kind of crude oil to run my own engine, I salute this. Great, great stuff.